By Siri Carpenter
“I don’t look like I have a disability, do I?” Jonas Moore asks me. I shake my head. No, I say — he does not.
Bundled up in a puffy green coat, Moore, 35 and sandy-haired, doesn’t stand out in the crowd seeking refuge from the winter cold in a drafty Starbucks. His handshake is firm and his blue eyes meet mine as we talk. He comes across as intelligent and thoughtful, if perhaps a bit reserved. His disability — a form of autism — is invisible.
That’s part of the problem, Moore says. Like most people with an autism spectrum disorder, he finds relationships challenging. In the past, he has been quick to anger and has had what he calls meltdowns. Those who don’t know he has autism can easily misinterpret his actions. “People think that when I do misbehave I’m somehow intentionally trying to be a jerk,” Moore says. “That’s just not the case.”
His difficulty managing emotions has gotten him into some trouble, and he has had a hard time holding onto jobs — an outcome he might have avoided, he says, if his co-workers and bosses had better understood his intentions.
Over time, things have gotten better. Moore has held the same job for five years, vacuuming commercial buildings on a night cleaning crew. He attributes his success to getting the right amount of medication and therapy, to time’s maturing him and to the fact that he works mostly alone.
Moore is fortunate. His parents help support him financially. He has access to good mental health care where he lives in Wisconsin. And he has found a job that suits him. Many adults with autism are not so lucky.

By Chelsea Rice
On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six personnel at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before turning the gun on himself.
Ever since, America has been wondering: Why?
Today, after investigating and detailing every available record of the 20-year-old Lanza’s life since birth, the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate released a report that said: We still don’t know what drove him to commit those terrible acts. But we do know he fell through the cracks of the school system, the health care system, and possibly the awareness of his own parents.
Every documented moment of Lanza’s life was evaluated, from mental health records that tracked his social development to school and medical records that outlined his needs—and showed disparities in the services provided to him by the state.
The review did not, however, stop at Lanza. It included a review of the laws regarding special education and the confidentiality of personal records in the system, as well as “how these laws implicate professional obligations and practices.” Unredacted state police and law enforcement records were also reviewed alongside interviews and extensive research with members of the Child Fatality Review Panel who led the initial investigation of that day.
From “earliest childhood,” according to the report, Lanza had “significant developmental challenges,” such as communication and sensory problems, delays in socialization, and repetitive behaviors. Lanza was seen and evaluated by the New Hampshire “Birth to Three” early intervention program when he was almost 3 years old, and referred to special education preschool services.

By Tracy Jarrett
Autism advocates on Friday applauded Jerry Seinfeld's disclosure that he may be autistic, while warning against making him the poster boy for a disorder that is no laughing matter.
“I think, on a very drawn-out scale, I think I’m on the spectrum,” Seinfeld told NBC Nightly News’ Brian Williams.
"Basic social engagement is really a struggle. I'm very literal, when people talk to me and they use expressions, sometimes I don't know what they're saying," he said. "But I don't see it as dysfunctional, I just think of it as an alternate mindset."
Seinfeld's revelation sends a positive message that the autism community is much larger and more diverse than people often understand, Ari Ne’eman, president of the Autistic Advocacy Network, told NBC News. Ne’eman is living with autism and says that there is still a tremendous amount of stigma surrounding autism that hinders the opportunities available to those with the disorder.
“Think about what this does for a closeted autistic person who goes into the workplace knowing that their co-workers have just seen somebody they know, respect, and have a positive opinion of, like Jerry Seinfeld, identify in this way — it’s a valuable and important step in building a greater tolerance for autism,” Ne’eman said.
Liz Feld, president of Autism Speaks, agreed, pointing out that “there are many people on the autism spectrum who can relate to Jerry’s heartfelt comments about his own experiences.”

By Neuroskeptic
A new paper threatens to turn the world of autism neuroscience upside down. Its title is Anatomical Abnormalities in Autism?, and it claims that, well, there aren’t very many.
Published in Cerebral Cortex by Israeli researchers Shlomi Haar and colleagues, the new research reports that there are virtually no differences in brain anatomy between people with autism and those without.
What makes Haar et al.’s essentially negative claims so powerful is that their study had a huge sample size: they included structural MRI scans from 539 people diagnosed with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 573 controls. This makes the paper an order of magnitude bigger than a typical structural MRI anatomy study in this field. The age range was 6 to 35.
The scans came from the public Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) database, a data sharing initiative which pools scans from 18 different neuroimaging centers. Haar et al. examined the neuroanatomy of the cases and controls using the popular FreeSurfer software package.
What did they find? Well… not much. First off, the ASD group had no differences in overall brain size (intracranial volume). Nor were there any group differences in the volumes of most brain areas; the only significant finding here was an increased ventricle volume in the ASD group, but even this had a small effect size (d = 0.34). Enlarged ventricles is not specific to ASD by any means – the same thing has been reported in schizophrenia, dementia, and many other brain disorders.

By Maggie Fox, Erika Edwards and Judy Silverman
Here’s how you might be able to turn autism around in a baby: Carefully watch her cues, and push just a little harder with that game of peek-a-boo or “This little piggy.” But don’t push too hard — kids with autism are super-sensitive.
That’s what Sally Rogers of the University of California, Davis has found in an intense experiment with the parents of infants who showed clear signs of autism. It’s one of the most hopeful signs yet that if you diagnose autism very early, you can help children rewire their brains and reverse the symptoms.
It was a small study, and it’s very hard to find infants who are likely to have autism, which is usually diagnosed in the toddler years. But the findings, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, offer some hope to parents worried about their babies.
“With only seven infants in the treatment group, no conclusions can be drawn,” they wrote.
However, the effects were striking. Six out of the seven children in the study had normal learning and language skills by the time they were 2 to 3.
Isobel was one of them.
“She is 3 years old now and she is a 100 percent typical, normally developing child,” her mother, Megan, told NBC News. The family doesn’t want their last name used for privacy reasons.
“We don’t have to do the therapy any more. It literally rewired her brain.”
Autism is a very common diagnosis for children in the U.S. The latest survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a startling 30 percent jump among 8-year-olds diagnosed with the disorder in a two-year period, to one in every 68 children.

By Rachel Feltman
At every waking moment, your brain is juggling two very different sets of information. Input from the world around you, like sights and smells, has to be processed. But so does internal information — your memories and thoughts. Right now, for example, I’m looking at a peach: It’s yellow and pink, and has a lot of fuzz. But I also know that it smells nice (a personal assessment) and I’m imagining how good it will taste, based on my previous experience with fragrant pink fruits.
The brain’s ability to handle these different signals is key to cognitive function. In some disorders, particularly autism and schizophrenia, this ability is disrupted. The brain has difficulty keeping internal and external input straight.
In a new study published Thursday in Cell, researchers observe the switching method in action for the first time. While the research used mice, not humans, principal investigator and NYU Langone Medical Center assistant professor Michael Halassa sees this as a huge step toward understanding and manipulating the same functions in humans.
“This is one of the few moments in my life where I’d actually say yes, absolutely this is going to translate to humans,” Halassa said. “This isn’t something based on genes or molecules that are specific to one organism. The underlying principles of how the brain circuitry works are likely to be very similar in humans and mice.”
That circuitry has been hypothesized for decades. Neurologists know that the cortex of the brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions, like music and language. And the thalamus, which is an egg-like structure in the center of the brain, works to direct the flow of internal and external information before it gets to the cortex.